self_inflictedexhile | nysm / tvd } { if you will, please move in closer

nysm / tvd } { if you will, please move in closer

In another lifetime, Dylan Rhodes never existed. In another lifetime, he didn't need to, because Lionel Shrike never drown in the Hudson River, Dylan Rhodes stayed Jacob Shrike, and his life went in a very different direction.

At age fifteen, his father started teaching him the tricks of the trade: sleight of hand, how to build a rig, how to do a little bit of actual magic, despite the fact that probably wasn't something he should be sharing, just yet. Shortly after that, Jacob met a young Alma Dray, tagging along with her grandfather, a friend of his father's, stopping by to check up on him. They grew up together, life continued on, and Jacob eventually went to college for Theatre Design and Stagecraft. At twenty-two, just after graduation, Jacob was chosen to join the Eye, his test to help the LVPD clear the name of another magician, despite all the evidence in the world making him seem guilty as sin. There, Jacob met Michael Fuller, his partner a lifetime away, and the two became friends as they managed, despite all odds, to pull off what had been asked of Jacob by the Eye. He continued on into a career as a stage magician in the Eye, eventually married Alma, and continued to occasionally work with Fuller as a consultant, when time allowed.

Over the course of the next few decades, Jacob and Alma tried to have children and failed, and eventually adopted one Jack Wilder, age 10. Using Eye resources, he helped Merritt McKinney get a good lawyer and clear his name after his brother screwed him over. He followed the rising stars that were J. Daniel Atlas and Henley Reeves, and when they decided to call it quits, pulled the both of them back together, forcing Daniel to give Henley a more active role in the show. And eventually, yes, he called the four of them together, not for revenge but something similar, to get them into the Eye. And somewhere along the way, Jacob and Alma tried for children again, and this time managed, giving Jack a brother, Lio, Lionel, named after his grandfather.

Basically, this is the best possible timeline.

And now, it's just after dinner, Jacob off to his nightly rehearsal at 5Pointz, that his space, now, like his father before him. He takes a detour tonight, though, to grab a cup of coffee, beforehand, a little bit of magic pulled around him, to make himself not completely invisible, but at least a little less noticeable. Normally, he doesn't mind showing off or signing autographs, when a fan approaches, and fans do often approach, his notoriety somewhere up there with Penn and Teller, Seigfried and Roy, but -- not tonight. He's not feeling it tonight, a little tired for whatever reason, hence the coffee, so magic it is. And now he's sitting at a table, idly people-watching as he leans into his cup. Have at him, if you can still see him (or, maybe, in certain party's cases, sense him) despite his best efforts.

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Josie looks delighted.

She laughs when she recognizes the card as her own and nods, reaching out to take it from his fingers. As she holds it up to see if she can get a better look at how he did the trick, the smile doesn't fade, either.

"You're an impressive showman. I can see why my friend likes you." She passes the card back to him once she's finished her inspection. "If you're this good winging it, you're probably even more impressive in an actual show."

"I learned from the best," Dylan answers with a shrug and a smile, as he takes the card back. He's also learned to keep a few things on his person, like the flash paper he used in that trick, just in case someone approaches him in public. It's really not that big a deal. Still, he's gracious enough to offer, "But thanks."

A pause follows, as he looks beyond her, back to the crowd that's slowly been gathering. When he returns his attentions to her, there's an apology written on his face, and he asks, "You mind giving me a minute here, though?"

He'd like to continue this conversation, talk about actual magic, that kinda thing, but he should also not just ignore the fans. If she has the time to wait on him, he'll spend a few minutes with them, then they can go somewhere else, somewhere more private. Maybe head in the direction of 5Pointz, even if they don't get all the way there, and this time with the magic to keep people from noticing him intact.

"Not at all."

She has the benefit of being the invisible one in this particular situation, so she steps back and lets Dylan do his thing. She doesn't wander far, though, just far enough to give him some space. She might get a coffee from one of the carts so that she doesn't look awkward.

After a couple more tricks and a handful of autographs, Dylan finally breaks with the crowd and heads over to her. As he approaches and once he's sure he has her attention, he nods towards the door, then adjusts his heading to lead the way out. He pauses again, once they're out on the street, fingers working subtly at his side as he pulls a blanket of magic over them. Now, no one will pay them any mind.

"Try not to water the plants with this one, huh?" he teases, sure she can feel it.

She laughs, tipping her head back as the spell settles over her, and she nods. "I'll do my best." And she will not siphon the magic this time, since it is a thing she can choose to do, and she doesn't want to blow Dylan's cover again. That would just be rude.

"So how long have you been a big magic star?"

"Thanks," he shoots back.

A moment of pause follows, at the question, his good humor fading into something more thoughtful as he tries to do the math in his head. "Uh," he starts effectually, as time and technicalities prove more difficult to put together than he figured they would be. He shakes his head a little before he continues, "I don't know? Like fifteen, twenty years?"

Another pause, then, "I've been doing magic on stage since I was, like, twenty-five-ish, but I've been doing actual magic for way longer than that." Which he probably wasn't supposed to be, he wasn't even supposed to know that real magic was a thing, given that he wasn't in the Eye until his early twenties, but -- well, his father hadn't been able to resist cluing him in and teaching him a few tricks, and he'd been eager to learn. No one had said anything since he hadn't made a nuisance of himself with it, he figures.

"I figured that much." Josie herself has been doing magic since the womb, but she also knows that she and Lizzie are kind of a special case. "That's pretty cool, though. That you figured out a way to hide in plain sight like that."

She doesn't have the showmanship for something like that, but he clearly does. It's good that he has the opportunity to make use of it.

"Yeah, Dad didn't teach me that one until I was a little older," Dylan tells her on the heel of a snort. He's pretty sure that Lionel's logic behind that one was that, if he taught him when he was younger, he might use the ability to start trouble -- nothing too terrible, probably, as he never was a bad kid, but still. He was a kid. He would have done something stupid at least once.

"But yeah," he continues after a beat. "A lot of the stuff I do's kinda ... showy." Or not, as the case may be. Most of it works on stage, somehow. Either way, "I take it that's not the case for you?"

The whole watering the plants thing was pretty subtle, comparatively.

Edited 2020-05-20 00:43 (UTC)

"Depends on the spell. I was definitely a bit of a fire bug as a kid."

... Still is, if she's being completely honest, but let's not scare off her new friend quite yet with her penchant for setting things on fire to fight back. Sometimes a monster like a mummy requires a big ol' fireball to put it back where it belongs.

"But most of the stuff I tend to use now is about ... protection."

If Dylan needs to reach for something, magically, to defend himself, it's going to be fire for him, too, so he really can't say much about that. The fact that she needs to protect herself from what he assumes is more than just muggers is enough to raise his eyebrows, however. "You get into a lot of trouble?"

"Here and there."

Not as much as she did when she was a teenager, and the school was a monster magnet, but at the same time, she's still one of the last remaining members of the Gemini Coven, one of the cursed set of twins designed to consume each other.

She and Lizzie have found ways around that ritual for now, but that's not going to work for long.

"When you're one of the last remaining witches of the Gemini Coven, it kind of comes with the territory."

"You got a twin around here somewhere I need to look out for?" he shoots back, trying to make a joke out of it. He's =more worried about someone else showing up to try and water the flowers with his magic, and not about the fact that, from what he knows of the Gemini Coven -- well, the shit they do with twins in their tradition is horrifying. Totally. Yep.

He really doesn't blame her for being something of a firebug, in that case. He's glad the Eye's traditions are much softer, saner.

"Not here? She's back in Virginia." Separate college has been hard, but it's also been good for them. Plus, it might buy them a little time in terms of the Merge. "She's also a little more ... focused? She's not really one for randomly playing with magic she found on a leisurely stroll."

"You miss her?" he asks after a moment, not trying to pry, but -- well, he's still good at reading people, and even if he has no siblings of his own, he can imagine. Lio spends most of his time following Jack around, when Jack is around, and looking for him, when he's not, and the age gap there is much greater. He can only imagine how it'd be with twins.

"Like crazy," Josie smiles before shaking her head. "Which most people would probably consider ridiculous because she is ... a lot as a person, but ... I've spent pretty much every day with her since I was born so not having her in arms reach is ... weird. To say the least."

Nodding, Dylan actually puts words to the thought that went through his head. "I got two kids, back home. They're not twins, but they're twenty-four and ten, but ... my oldest had to spend a year away from home, as part of his induction into our coven, and I'm pretty sure Lio was on the verge of losing his mind by the end of it."

"Poor kid," Josie says with a sympathetic smile. "Could they at least Face Time or something?" It seems cruel to completely cut off all modes of communication, but she also knows that covens have their rituals.

Case in point with the Gemini Coven. Even if it was a curse.

This time, Dylan shakes his head.

"Part of it was seeing how well he'd do without any of his lifelines," he answers. It is cruel, maybe, and God, he missed Jack, that year he was working with the Horsemen, but everyone survived. "It's about finding your own way, taking a leap of faith, that kinda thing. If he had us to fall back on ... " Rather than finish that statement, he shrugs.

She nods, because in some ways that makes sense. Sometimes you have to cut the strings to learn to fly, and all of those weird metaphors about growing up.

"That's kind of what I'm doing here, but we don't have any FaceTime rules. It makes sense though. Eventually you have to figure out how to handle things on your own."

"Part of growing up," Dylan agrees. At least, in this version of events, Dylan didn't leave the Horsemen more or less on the run forever. His revenge was a little watered down here, for all that his father survived.

"But anyway," he continues after a beat, that thread of the conversation more or less having run its course. Things may loop back around to Jack and Lio, for all that they're his world, along with Alma, but for now, he asks,"You know what you're going for, college-wise?" He's not sure it's blatantly come up that she's here for college, but he's guessing she's here for college. It stands to reason, given her age and all.

"Teaching, probably, like my dad. I'm thinking about taking of the school when he's ready to retire, though knowing him that may be a long time from now."

She hopes, given that her father is human, running a magical school. But he's been avoiding monsters for this long, odds are liver failure will get him before a monster will.

"School?" Dylan echoes, curious. That definitely didn't come up, and if he's aware of the Salvatore School, he's not connecting it to her, right off the bat. Maybe it's because her family name isn't Salvatore, ridiculous as that is -- just because her father runs the school doesn't mean he's the one who named it or had it named for him.

"Yeah. My parents founded the Salvatore Boarding School?" It's not a common knowledge thing because Alaric Saltzman isn't normally the face of the enterprise. That's usually Caroline Forbes who travels the world doing recruitment and fundraising. "My dad's currently the headmaster."

"Huh," he drawls, recognition on his face. Yeah, he's heard of the school, but again with the part where he wouldn't have connected it and her if she hadn't directly pointed it out. "I figured it was that it was that woman -- what's her name? Forbes?"

Clearly, Caroline's doing her job well.

"Yep. That's my mom. But she handles recruitment and public facing stuff while my dad handles our actual education and the day-to-day things. They make a pretty good team."

Never mind the fact that Caroline Forbes is a vampire, but that's neither here nor there.

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